The partnership focuses on accelerating the ability of communications service providers to deploy their virtualised radio access network (RAN) and open RAN solutions with next-generation infrastructure and hardware, the two companies said on Tuesday.

Other areas that the partnership focuses on include launching new lab environments to help communications service providers innovate for cloud native-based 5G networks and making it easier for communications service providers to deliver business applications to the network edge.

"Communications service providers can adopt cloud-native technologies to harness the potential of 5G both as a connectivity solution and as a business services platform to deliver applications to the network edge," Shailesh Shukla, Vice President and General Manager of Networking at Google Cloud, said in a statement.

This collaboration marks another important step forward in Intel's journey to help transform the 5G network with a software-defined, agile and scalable infrastructure.

The telco cloud reference architectures and integrated solutions from Intel and Google will help communications service providers further accelerate scalable network and edge deployment as they implement multi cloud architectures.

This is critical to achieving the full potential of 5G, edge and artificial intelligence across a range of industries, including retail, manufacturing and healthcare, Intel and Google said.

"The next wave of network transformation is fueled by 5G and is driving a rapid transition to cloud-native technologies," said Dan Rodriguez, Corporate Vice President and General Manager of the Network Platforms Group at Intel.

"As communications service providers build out their 5G network infrastructure, our efforts with Google and the broader ecosystem will help them deliver agile, scalable solutions for emerging 5G and edge use cases."